How to plan for your career on Wall Street while still in College

Welcome back,

It’s time to really start diving into the resources I’ve written for younger analysts pursuing a career in Credit. A lot of the upcoming posts over the next few months are going to be for younger professionals/college students.

I want to expand on each area I did not cover to provide a comprehensive guide mainly for college students and people a few years out of school (but it may be relevant for anyone else recruiting or trying to break into a new role).

To preface this, I have to say, one person’s career advice may not be the perfect fit for you – We all come from different backgrounds, have different desires in life, want to live in different cities, have different motivations, have different levels of skills & intellect, have a different amount of time they want to spend in finance, etc. I think my perspectives here are valuable – but you’re likely best served by combining the opinions of 5-10 people you respect and determining for yourself which pieces of advice to move forward with.

Secondly, this is an American account based in NYC. My experience may not be completely relevant to the experience you may have in a different country. I’m sure there are parallels, but again I’m American, so I can’t speak well about the German education system or Italian banking jobs.

There are plenty of investment banking and private equity guides so the bulk of this writing is driven from my experience and geared towards the public credit and private credit routes instead.

Lastly, I keep my experience intentionally vague for the sake of anonymity. I hope you guys can understand that. These views I have aren’t meant to reflect poorly on my current employer or previous employer(s) nor are they meant to reflect poorly on connections I have made throughout my career in finance thus far. I am increasingly grateful for the opportunities that have been given to me within my career and the people who have made that happen.

With these disclaimers aside, let’s get into it:

Once I realized going into sophomore year that I wanted to get on Wall Street, I was highly methodical, step-by-step, and brick-by-fucking-brick about what needed to be done to get to NYC for my junior year internship. Unfortunately, my dad isn’t an MD at JPM, so I had to fight tooth and nail to get up to NYC. It’s taken me forever to write about this, but here we go – here’s what you should methodically think about, years before you even step on the street.

High School:

Ya, we’re starting at high school, because surprisingly on FinTwit I had a high school student with Ivy and full-ride non-target offers contemplating whether he should take the full-ride or pay all in for Ivy. I turned the question over to FinTwit.

You can take a look at the full tweet later but most people ended up saying just to go Ivy since you’ll increase the odds of getting to IB significantly. However, people noted that if the “unknown school” is somewhere that’s semi target then he should go there. If it’s a rando ass school, then he shouldn’t go there. There’s a tongue and cheek joke in the replies of that tweet saying “I went semi-target and ended up in private credit”, but obviously as you’ve seen from my Comp surveys, private credit is a fine industry to be in.